But just minutes before the cutoff at 1 p.m., Duane Grilli pulled up with a monster-sized squash in the back of his 1946 Chevrolet pickup truck.

"Now I'm nervous," said England, a Ukiah resident who has entered the competition the past five years.

Despite its flashy entrance, however, Grilli's pumpkin weighed in at 565 pounds, leaving England's at the top.

The second heaviest was a 580-pound squash grown by Mike Brock of Boonville, a farmer who said this year's pumpkins were plagued by disease.

"They didn't like the cool nights in Boonville," he said, adding that the late-season heat didn't help, either. "That just makes them split easier."

Fellow grower Ben Filmore usually enters a big pumpkin every year along with Brock, but his best contender rotted.

Luckily, Filmore said he hadn't really intended to enter a squash this year and was originally growing the plants for someone else, so he didn't mind the loss so much.

The journey of raising a champion pumpkin is long and full of risk.

First you give the plant plenty of water and fertilizer and wait for the first squashes to appear. Then you decide which one or two to keep and constantly prune down the rest of the plant, all while still giving it tons of water and feeding it things like fish emulsion and seaweed.

To keep the plant strong and feeding its large pumpkin, Brock and Filmore said they keep burying most of the plant to make sure it grows plenty of roots to keep its squash growing.

"I measure it every day, and it can grow four to five inches a day," said Brock, describing the process as "miraculous. Every morning it's a surprise. It's addicting."

"A pumpkin can add 25 to 27 pounds a day," Filmore said, and Brock added: "Nothing grows that fast. I don't think even baby elephants grow that much in a day."

But it can all end one morning when you come out to find that a gopher has dug up underneath the pumpkin and started eating it. Or that it split. Or that it just stopped growing.

England said his winner "raced up to 600 pounds in 45 days," then looked like it had stopped growing. But while the plant died off, the squash kept growing.

Last year, he had a 629-pound pumpkin that earned eighth place, and this year he said he added "a lot more compost and things to the soil I needed to."

It costs $5 to enter and money prizes are given to the top 15 entries. First place earns $1 a pound, second place earns $325 and so on. The weirdest gourd and the "largest greenie" are each given $50.

Justine Frederiksen can be reached at udjjf@pacific.net, on Twitter @JustFrederiksen or at 468-3521.